[Fsfe-uk] OSS Supporters - Was Re: Expo

[Martyn Ranyard]

At 10:42 AM 10/14/02 +0100, Alex McLintock wrote:
> Hello Folks,
>
> I run one of a number of small to medium sized companies who want to 
> provide support for Free Software to other companies.
> To help us all I have set up a directory of these companies to be found at 
> the URL below.

Good work, and I will be registering our company, but I have the following 
initial feedback :

1) Open Source is not necessarily Free - Free Software is what AFFS / FSFE 
are about, maybe you should think of making it the Free Software support list.
2) Your list of "Open Source" projects is very limited - I have added a 
list at the end of this mail of suggestions.
3) Areas of expertise - obviously for example "setting up a RAID server 
with cd/dvdwriting centralised printing/scanning/faxing/pdf-creation" isn't 
a piece of software, but done within Free Software i.e. GNU/Linux, Samba 
and Ghostscript is a complex task, and it's the integration that is 
needed.  Okay, I'm explaining our company's niche here, but to get people 
onboard, they need to be able to sell themselves.

> I briefly said hello to the people at the stand at the Linux expo and 
> chatted about the directory. The person I chatted to said that others were 
> interested in starting a similar directory. I'd be quite happy to discuss 
> sharing the workload (and the Kudos). Perhaps we can set things up so that 
> the  database can mirrored on other companies' websites?

I'm sure we can mirror it.

> Comments people? Is this an ok topic to discuss on this list?

I would imagine that aside from the reservations about the use of the OSS 
term, it would be on-topic, but not for "Re: Expo"

> Alex McLintock

List of Free Software we use (Obviously incomplete, in no particular order, 
and not sure if all are Free, I'm doing this off the top of my head):

Samba; netatalk; GhostScript; APSFilter; Bind; Postfix; Sendmail; Qmail; 
Sane; OpenSSL; OpenSSH; FreeS/WAN; KDE; Gnome; VNC (not Free afaik); 
Cygwin; Transcode; FFMpeg; mplayer/mencoder; Plex86; raidtools; XFS; 
ReiserFS; ext3; FreePascal; Lazarus; PostgreSQL; MySQL; NUT; Gimp; 
ImageMagick; bash; Python; ipchains; iptables; sox; Horde;  I give up, I 
can't think of any more, my brain is fried.


-
Martyn Ranyard
Free Software Advocate

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